As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.